28.1. One night when Marilyn was out—narrative closure urges me to make it her visit to the Sea Colony she details in the poem in §26 (a notorious, if staid, lesbian bar in the fifties and sixties) described above, but Mnemosyne (though at her most untrustworthy) tells me that visit was on a cooler evening, perhaps in November—Ana dropped over for a return engagement.

It was a sweltering night.

I’d been somewhat surprised that I’d been able to get an erection before, as two women at once as a fantasy simply bore no erotic charge for me.

And yet—like how many heterosexual men confronted with a homosexual encounter—I’d discovered that the reality of human bodies, despite the intricate psychic web that binds it, is often, and especially in the young, more agile than our expectations. I liked her. And I was still interested in exploring the limits of my own sexual map.

Ana bit her nails as badly as any boy I’d ever mooned after. I’d always felt the habit, hugely erotic for me in men, would become a damper to sex when exhibited by women. But, while in our last encounter it had not added anything the way it would have with a man, it had not halted me either. With Marilyn, of course, I was sexually familiar and at ease. What would it be like without her?

We went to bed.

My memory is that it was hot, sweaty work—made pleasant enough by the moments of conversation and joking that, now and again, punctuated it. In the middle of some particularly sweat-drenched and robust bout, there was an insistent knock at the door.

Then the bell rang, equally insistently.

I raised my head, frowning.

I thought it was Sonny—when he dropped by, he always knocked and rang both—so I didn’t bother to put on any clothes. All the lights were off in the apartment. I intended just to open the door, tell him it was the wrong time to come by, and go back to what I was doing.

Streaming sweat in the dark kitchen, I turned the brass lock and pulled the door back.

And looked out and up on a tall man in glasses.

Under the sweat, I was almost immediately overcome with goose-flesh, the way one is at the sound of nails on slate or, sometimes, on learning that someone near to you has just died.

“Excuse me,” he said, “Chip.…”

It was Fred. He wanted to know if I’d seen his young girlfriend. She’d been talking about possibly coming to see me and Marilyn, and, as she hadn’t returned, he was worried about her …

It was impossible not to recall the moment, from months back, when Mike had come pounding on the door looking for Gail. However much milder Fred’s demeanor was, certainly it was compensated for by the reality enfolded in the damp sheets inside.

“Gosh, Fred,” I said, “no, Ana hasn’t been by here.” Then I added, “I’m sorry, but I have a friend of mine inside—” (It was pretty well known in the Village folksinging circles I moved in that I was gay; and I knew people frequently speculated on what sort of “arrangement” Marilyn and I had. And I was standing at the cracked doorway, obviously buck-naked) “—and he doesn’t have much time. Do you mind if I get back to him?”

“Oh,” Fred said. “Okay. I’m sorry.”

“If I see her,” I said, “I’ll tell her you’re looking for her.”

“Okay,” Fred said. “Thanks.”

“Good night.” I closed the door, turned the lock, and started back through the dark kitchen, thinking about a lot of things.

Understand: Marilyn had been the first woman I’d been to bed with—and the act had precipitated me almost immediately into an uncomfortable marriage. Ana, inside, was the second; and here I was, already lying my way out of a situation from some Feydeau farce. In hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of homosexual encounters, casual or committed, nothing like this had ever happened to me. Was it, I wondered, something in the institution of heterosexuality that was, itself, just … off? Occasionally I’d told myself that if women were as easily available as men, I might pursue more of them sexually. And as often I told myself that that was a rationalization. Little or nothing in my fantasy life pushed me to such pursuit. But now I found myself thinking that, perhaps, if I had a choice, heterosexuality was something better avoided and just much too much trouble for someone who was not particularly disposed in that direction anyway.

I sat down on the damp mattress, where the sheet had pulled loose. “That was Fred,” I said, “looking for you.”

“Oh,” she said. “I thought it might be. I’m awfully glad you didn’t tell him I was here.”

We stayed in bed together another hour.

Then she showered and went home.

When Marilyn got back, we sat together on the living room bed, made up neatly now, and I aired some of these thoughts.

She almost laughed herself silly. And she and Ana were planning to take a five-day hitchhiking trip together up to Provincetown soon, anyway.

28.2. To those among my straight friends with whom it came up, I usually characterized myself as homosexual. But among my gay friends, out of a kind of niggling guilt—since whatever my fantasy life, my relationship with Marilyn, once we were married, was one of easy and regular sex—I’d call myself bisexual.

The minister’s son who had been the object of that catastrophic ten-day affair the previous November now dropped by to say hello. He had developed a permanent lover, a redheaded church organist, half a dozen years older than he, Marilyn, and I—a young man who, it turned out, was another, former Science graduate.

Sitting and talking with him, that afternoon he came over, at one point, when he’d asked me what I thought of myself as, and I’d answered, with a shrug, “… bisexual,” he took a drag of his cigarette and said: “Maybe there isn’t any such thing, really, as bisexuality.”

28.3. It was the first time, though not the last, I heard the suggestion. The behaviorist approach to psychology (“You are what you do”) that dominated the forties and fifties, only to be seriously challenged in the sixties—and that I was still upholding, however tentatively, by my declaration of bisexuality—was not a sui generis invention of Dr. B. F. Skinner. It was rather an academic operationalization of the modernist aesthetic that was just as clearly expressed in the conclusion of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (1921), “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,” as it was in the precepts of the Imagist poets, or in the prose of the academic favorite, Ernest Hemingway, or the popular favorite, Raymond Chandler. Those—later in the sixties—who saw a strain of fascism running through behaviorism were responding to just this element, as it is the political operationalization of an aesthetic (as Susan Sontag has pointed out) that is the fascist hallmark: “It doesn’t matter what it feels like as long as it looks good.”

The messy and marginal, which is how fascism has always conceived its enemy (“It doesn’t matter what it looks like—so long as it feels good”), besides always appropriating fascist emblems for their own look, always use a code of appearances to determine precisely how things feel—or are supposed to feel.

Twenty-five years later, I would simply have answered that there is definitely such a thing as bisexuality. And though, indeed, I am not it, I have met too many who are for it not to exist. In terms of subject, how things feel has got to be part of specifically behavioral categories—certainly in matters of desire.

28.4. But the reason the minister’s son had come by was to invite Marilyn and me to dinner at the apartment of his lover, Guy. He himself did not have many friends his own age—and his lover had made the suggestion that he invite us in the first place.

It was an eminently civilized gesture—and it began a series of very pleasant evenings, now at their apartment on Hudson Street and, a little later, in their second-floor flat in the picturesque alley of Patchin Place, just next to where E. E. Cummings had lived and right across the cobbles from where the aging Djuna Barnes still resided, during which their downstairs neighbor, a mannish woman named Dotty, would drop in to regale us with fascinating stories of various Village characters, from Smith College encounters with “Vincent” (her name for Edna St. Vincent Millay) and, striding through the night in the black cloak given her by Peggy Guggenheim, Barnes herself.

One evening Dotty invited the four of us into her cramped apartment, with its framed Beardsley on the wall above the fat plush sofa arm, where she passed out brandy snifters. Marilyn, John, and I sat on the floor, Dotty sat on the couch, and Guy in a corner chair. My sense is, in that diminutive Patchin Place livingroom, no knee was more than six inches from any other.

“Five or six years ago, now, I was walking my dog—” Dotty explained, putting the bottle back on the side table and bending to pat the head of the creature, at her feet as were we—“somewhere over in the East Village; though it was the East Side, then. It occurred to me I wanted a beer; and I was passing this bar, on Seventh Street, I think: McSorley’s. So I turned in—”

We all perked up. McSorley’s Old Ale House was a holdover from the mid-eighteen-fifties, famous (especially, during the first half of our century) with Ivy League fraternity men for not allowing women on its premises.

“Understand, I knew nothing about the place. I walked over to the counter and said to the bartender, ‘I’ll have a draught, please.’ Well, between the porch and the alter, I’d already noticed an odd feel. Everyone was staring at me—the way I dress, sometimes people do; though mostly I barely notice: I thought it was because I had the dog. The bartender hesitated a moment, then went and drew me a glass, brought it back, and I picked it up and drank from it. Well, don’t you know, at that moment everybody in the place applauded—and stood up! I looked around. That’s when I saw that they were all men. Well, then, somebody explained what the place was. It wasn’t a gay bar, though it might as well have been. There’s a sign on the window I hadn’t seen: ‘Women will not be served.’ Apparently, they told me, I was the first woman who had been through the door in a hundred years. Even the woman who owned the place had never come inside!” Dotty laughed explosively. “Well, I’ll tell you, after I finished my beer, I was quite happy to go! I certainly wasn’t interested in a place with no women! Really, I felt rather sorry for them. But, I thought, leave them be. Still, to applaud—that was gallant.” Laughing with her and sipping Hennessy, crossed-legged on the rug in that little room, which, in memory, is lit with ivory light from behind me and orange from my right, even then I had a sense Dotty’s mid-fifties infiltration of that all-male space had been a political turning point. Also it carried a lesson about power (as opposed to material strength, with which power may or may not be enforced): It is always located with the people, no matter the claims of an administration, and may be defied as easily as pristine ignorance’s stroll across a bar’s dark floor planks.